Norwell lawyer who once prosecuted Nazis takes turn defending a war criminal

More than half a century after his early-morning execution, one of Japan’s most notorious war criminals has found an unlikely defender: Allan Ryan, a legal scholar from Norwell who once led a federal office charged with prosecuting Nazis living in the U.S.

Long before dawn one morning in 1946, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita climbed a scaffold in a Manila cane field to answer for the murders, torture and rapes that Japanese troops had unleashed on the Philippines in the final year of World War II.

More than half a century after his execution, one of Japan’s most notorious war criminals has found an unlikely defender: Allan Ryan, a legal scholar from Norwell who once led a federal office that prosecuted Nazis living in the U.S.

Ryan’s book, “Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability,” illustrates what Ryan describes as Yamashita’s “show trial” and the shadow it cast over modern-day questions about actions taken in the name of fighting terrorism and the responsibility that commanders have for the actions of their soldiers, even when they disobey them.

“You look back, and you say this came to a bad end,” Ryan said. “Even though he was an enemy general, he deserved to have a fair trial so we could have confidence in the verdict.”

Deporting Nazis

Ryan is an unlikely candidate to make the case for Yamashita’s innocence. A Cambridge native who got his start in the legal world after landing a job clerking for the Supreme Court the year it was deciding the Pentagon Papers case, Ryan was working in the Solicitor General’s Office in 1980 when a Justice Department official offered him a job hunting down and prosecuting Nazis who had come to the country more than three decades earlier.

Ryan ended up spending four years leading an office of about 45 investigators, lawyers and historians. During his tenure, the Office of Special Investigations prosecuted about 40 Nazi war criminals, mostly death camp guards and auxiliary policemen who had fled Eastern Europe after the war.

The lawyers knew they couldn’t prosecute the defendants for the actual crimes they committed during the Holocaust, so they pursued another tactic, seeking to deport the former Nazis by arguing that they had lied on immigration papers that asked whether they had committed war crimes.

Though the proceedings were based on immigration law, Ryan said they had all the drama of a war crime trial, complete with witnesses, historians and old Nazi records. In one case, prosecutors proved that an auxiliary policeman from Lithuania had played a role in the murder of a 9-year-old girl.

“The people we prosecuted all had blood on their hands,” he said. “We were not interested in anybody whose only sin was misrepresenting their age or anything like that.”

Ryan left the office after four years – believing that there were few Nazis left in the country to be found and deported – and eventually took a job teaching the law of war at Boston College and Harvard University. While preparing a course, he became interested in a dissenting opinion written by Supreme Court justices who heard Tomoyuki Yamashita’s appeal in 1946.

Page 2 of 2 - The justices had written that Yamashita’s hastily organized military trial “constituted such extreme departures from basic standards of fairness that the petitioner did not have a fair trial” and that the general had been convicted of – and later hanged for – nothing more than being a Japanese commander.

Creating a crime

The problem, Ryan said, is that prosecutors invented a new and unprecedented crime for Yamashita: failing to control his troops. In reality, he said, the general ordered his troops to abandon Manila in 1945 – an order ignored by his subordinates – and was more than 125 miles away from the city when the atrocities there were committed.

Ryan began looking into the case in 2008 and found that little had been written about it. As he continued to dig, he found a trove of photographs from Yamashita’s trial on display in a small library in Indiana, located a former Marine major who was an interpreter during the trial, and combed through one of only two copies of the 4,000-page trial transcript.

His search also brought him to a kitchen in Montpelier, Vt., where he met a 96-year-old woman who had come to know Yamashita while she worked as a secretary for the defense lawyers. At one point, the woman handed him a scarf that the general had given her as a gift after the trial was over.

“She spoke very highly of him,” he said. “She said he was a gentleman – considerate, thoughtful, had a sense of humor and was stoic in the sense that he faced everything as it came.”

Ryan said his book, which illustrates what he sees as the many shortcomings of Yamashita’s trial and the flawed logic of the Supreme Court decision that upheld its outcome, is particularly relevant today as the country grapples with the actions of American soldiers in places like Abu Ghraib in Iraq, as well as its treatment of suspected terrorists.

“It brings home the lesson that we need to provide the protections of the Constitution not because of who the terrorists are but because this is how our government is supposed to operate,” he said. “We don’t put on show trials. We have trials because we have evidence to show the person is guilty.”